


to the various futures (not to all)

by malfaisant



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Darker Timelines?, I am very sorry, M/M, Night Watch, Other, not quite a Dark AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-20 08:17:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5998465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malfaisant/pseuds/malfaisant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You didn’t warn me about this!”</p><p>Lu-Tze raised a finger. “Ah, but it’s not first time you’ve encountered something like it.”</p><p>Vimes opened his mouth to yell some more, before pausing. He remembered an imp in a box, ringing madly as it announced his death, though not before announcing the death of everyone else around him, <i>bingely-bingely-beep…</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> spoilers for _Night Watch_ , small references to _Thief of Time_ and _Jingo_. mind the warnings, though the noncon tag is only for Carcer/Vimes. my apologies to Borges for the title.

The day that Carcer was due to be hanged, the scent of lilacs still hung thickly in the air, but nauseatingly so, with a sickly-sweet character that hinted of cloying rot and decay.

The event had drawn a sizeable audience, though this was hardly unusual, when many Ankh-Morporkians considered public executions as the city’s official spectator sport. What was, perhaps, actually a little unusual were the number of watchmen interspersed among the onlookers, some looking grave and somber, others looking scornful, all focused on the man at the podium.

As he was led up the steps, Carcer made a show of scanning the throng in front of him, before he caught sight of where Vimes was standing just outside the perimeter of the crowd, leaning against a black coach. He grinned slowly, widely, before the black hood was thrown over his head and the noose tightened around his neck. If he had any last words, Vimes was too far away to hear it.

It was a little much to hope for some remorse, or even fear. A man like Carcer was incapable of either, having long ago accepted that he would not have a long life, living the way he did, a candle with the wick at both ends, set alight, and doused in gasoline for good measure.

Well, he never did value the lives of others, so why should his own should be any different?

The hangman pulled the lever, the trapdoor opened, and the rope quivered for a moment, before pulling bowstring-taut. The body would be left out to hang a while for public display, and Vimes would later make his way over to the corpse after the hangman cuts it down, just to make certain the man was well and truly dead.

Vimes blew out a thick cloud of smoke, before grinding the cigar stub underfoot. He rapped his knuckles on the door of the coach. The door swung open, and Vimes ducked inside wordlessly.

“He took quite a bit of time to die,” said Vetinari conversationally, not looking up from the files he was perusing on his lap.

Vimes scowled, and propped his chin on one hand. Part of him still wished he could've wrung the bastard's neck himself. “Men like him always do.”

“Well, it’s reassuring to know he did not suffer an easy death. I must commend Mr. Trooper on another job well done.”

When it seemed evident that all he would receive in response was Vimes’ sullen silence, Vetinari sighed. “We’ll have the Watch briefing at the palace, shall we?” he said, before knocking his cane on the roof of the coach.

Vimes kept his stare fixed on the gallows, or what could be seen of it through the gap in the curtain, until the coach made a turn that brought it out of sight.

*

And for many realities, that was the end of that, a man dead and all his evils buried with him. But it doesn’t always end so neatly, did it? If anything can happen without breaking any physical laws, then somewhere, in some time, it happened. Will happen. Must have happened. Grammaticians everywhere are still working on it.

*

_Sam grips his pike tightly as he waited at the main palace gates. The summons had come in an hour ago, and the captain was busy talking with the new Patrician somewhere inside the palace._

_This Sam had worn no lilacs, had made no grand last stand. Instead, he had watched a man named John Keel die on the barricades, an arrow to his heart, as history knows he did. John Keel died on the barricades, mere days ago, and the revolution shortly followed after him._

_A man emerges from the palace and catches sight of Sam from across the courtyard._

_Captain Carcer of the Palace Guard smiles at him, and Lance-constable Vimes feels a cold shiver run down his spine. He beckons Sam toward him with a wave of his hand._

“ _Vimes, was it?” said the other man, still grinning. "Your old sarge spoke very highly of you. Shame about him, really, but what can ya do?"_

_Sam remembers the house on Cable Street, remembers watching it burn. He keeps the memory of it now, a glorious, cleansing fire, as he grits his teeth and nods._

“ _I’ve put in a transfer for you to the Palace Guard, under my command and a promotion to boot. Ain’t that nice of me?”_

“ _So I was told. Can I ask why, sir?”_

“ _I know potential when I see it, lad. I’m shaking the guard up a bit, under new management, so to speak. Besides, we wouldn’t want the old man’s memory to go unrespected now, do we?  And what better way, I thought, than to take his protégé under my wing?”_

_The hand holding the pike trembles slightly, equal parts rage and fear, but when Sam replies, his voice is level. “Can I refuse?”_

_Carcer’s grin, impossibly, grows even wider. “Oh, you certainly can, constable, but let’s just say it won’t be in your best interests to do so, haha.”_

*

Vimes jolted to wakefulness, an unpleasant sensation considering he didn’t even remember falling asleep. He was sitting at his desk in Pseudopolis Yard, a mess of paperwork in front of him. There were no freak magical thunderstorms out the window. Just outside his door were the usual late afternoon noises of the station: Detritus giving out that evening’s patrol assignments; Constable Visit proselytizing to some unlucky new recruit; the ever-present gurgle of their industrial-strength coffee maker. He grabbed a piece of paper, saw the date stamped on the top-right corner, and let himself calm down.

This was now. He was Commander Vimes of the City Watch, and Carcer was dead.

He rubbed tiredly at his face, and noted idly that he needed a shave. It was just a dream, brought about by overwork and too many sleepless nights. As a new father, he could even plausibly claim it wasn’t his fault, for once.

And yet, that had been more than a dream, just a hair short of a memory…

There was a flash of orange at the corner of his vision, and he turned to see Carrot ducking in through the doorway.

“Are you alright, Commander? I heard a jolt.”

“Yeah, dozed off for a bit," Vimes said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Send Cheery in with her report on the Dimwell Quay homicide and a pot of coffee, will you?”

He then shook his head, and shuffled the papers around his desk into a more disorganized mess. It was fine. He was fine.

*

Time was fragile, as Lu-Tze had told Vimes often enough, and this time around it had definitely, maybe, broken a bit.

Take entropy as the measure of disorder in the universe. Unlike most of the other laws of physics, which many of the inhabitants of the Disc regarded as mere suggestions, the second law of entropy was one that they abided by to the letter. Few worlds could do disorder half as well as one carried on the backs of four elephants and a giant turtle. The entropy of a system could only increase, as time flows in a forward direction. Entropy exists because time exists, and vice versa.

And the Auditors of Reality had thought, well, if those simpletons liked the second law of thermodynamics so much, then it only stood to reason that they’d like the third even better! The entropy of a system at a temperature of absolute zero is _zero_ , and though it was physically impossible to reach this state in a finite number of steps, zero was a value, and could therefore be approximated. Make zero the limit of an asymptomatic function. Bring existence to a standstill, with a perfect clock marking an indivisible unit of time, so as to make entropy, essentially, equal to zero. That was good, the Auditors thought. That was _math_.

But the thing with people was that most of them weren’t very good at math, Vimes included.

So, shit happens, people happen, the metaphor becomes a lot less quantitative, and everything comes out a bit more pear-shaped, to the dissatisfaction of everyone involved. The trousers of time was thrown in the wash and got all twisted and stretched and, and _bifurcated_ , and maybe it’s stained a little because you didn’t sort the colours like your mum had taught you to, and it’s shrunk a size smaller in the dryer—

Or time was, more poignantly, a river, a roaring, sweeping current, changing course now and then in times of drought and times of flood, but always, always making its way to the sea—

Or, maybe, time was a clock, and if you wedge something in the gears to try and make it stop, the wheels will keep on trying to turn anyway, until something gives, a screw coming loose or a spring unwinding—

A spring unwinded, uncoiled, and snapped back.

*

_Sam closes the door of the palace watchhouse behind him, breathing hard. He's covered all over in blood, still warm, his hair matted down to his forehead with it. None of it is his but he thinks, desperately, that some of it should be._

_There is no universe in which Sam Vimes would ever hide behind the excuse of just following orders, but that does not mean Sam never wishes he could, just this once._

_He moves away from the door, stops in front of his locker. He tries to wipe the blood out of his eyes, and his hands come away red and wet with tears, but at least he isn’t shaking anymore. It hadn’t even been a riot, not really. It had been just the one man, an angry drunk who got carried away, and Sam had been the closest watchman, an easy target, or so it seemed at the time._

_People get frustrated easy, when they’ve been promised change but all they get is more food shortages._

_Revolutions come and go. People die, and nothing changes. Don’t draw your sword unless you’re prepared to follow through. Today, moreso than usual, Keel’s words follow him around like the ghost of the man himself._

_Behind him, the door creaks on its hinges as someone steps into the room._

“ _Good work out there today, constable,” said a cheerful voice._

_Sam turns around slowly, dread curling in his gut. Carcer is leaning against the frame of the doorway. He pats around his pockets a bit before taking out a battered carton of cigarettes. A scratching noise, and the match flares bright for a moment, brilliant in the grey, unlit gloom of the watchhouse._

“ _Of course, you had no choice, Vimes,” Carcer said consolingly, and blows out a cloud of smoke in his direction. He starts to walk towards Sam. “The man was coming right at you, ready to bash your head in. You were only defending yourself, weren’t you?”_

_Sam does not even know the man’s name, only knows that his sword had cut right through the stranger like a paper doll, because he isn't in the Night Watch anymore. The arms of the Palace Guard are forged by the finest blacksmiths in the city._

_Sam doesn't answer him._

“ _We’re watchmen, Vimes. We defend the law, uphold the peace, and we are the law, and we are the peace, understand?”_

_Carcer taunts him with utter sincerity in his voice, genuine concern in his expression. Sam does not trust himself to talk, so he stays quiet, looks down on the floorboards and focuses instead on the sensation of blood drying on his skin._

_The law is to punish the wicked._

_Looking away was his first mistake. Carcer’s hand darts out like a snake, and he grabs Sam’s chin roughly, tilting his head up so that their eyes met. He takes a long drag on the cigarette and blows the smoke in Sam’s face._

“ _I asked if you understand, Constable Vimes.”_

_He wants to beat Carcer’s hand away, make it so he never touches him again. His fingers twitch, itching to wrap themselves around Carcer’s throat, but he tamps down on the urge, as a dead man’s words come to him once more, another ghost of many._

_This is not the time. Hold it back, tame it, send it back to the dark and it’ll come when you call…_

“ _Yes, captain,” Sam says._

_Carcer holds him there for a moment more, his eyes searching. He must find what he’s looking for, as he nods to himself, satisfied. He rubs the flat of his palm over Sam’s face, smearing the blood over his mouth, his eyes, before the fingers card through his hair and slicks it back out of his face. He steps back, hands on his hips, as though to admire his work._

“ _Atta boy, Vimesy. Always knew you were a fast learner.”_

*

The…visions, for lack of a better word, came to Vimes most often when he was half-asleep. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they trailed him when he was wide awake, forming hazy afterimages, outlines of familiar scenes and places jarred disconcertingly out of focus. They came in broken bits and fragments, like a box of puzzle pieces upended over his head to form a picture he didn’t want to see. And the gods be damned, didn’t he earn that right? What the hell had he fought like _hell_ for, if not to stop it all from happening? Or…have stopped it all from happening? Whatever.

He pressed the heel of his palm against his temple. The not-memories were too coherent, too... _consistent_ , to be products of simple madness, so at least there was still the chance there might be a logical explanation for it all, instead of the more immediate one that presented itself, that Vimes had finally snapped.

_The man known as Carcer glances at Keel, before his eyes dart back to Sam, looking him up and down._

“ _Vimesy? Your name Sam Vimes, mister?”_

“ _I ain’t saying anything,” says Sam staunchly, even as something in the other man’s expression unnerved him to his core. There is something off about his gaze, the sensation of something peering through the holes from a hollow place behind his eyes, like a painting in some old castle._

“ _Well, well, well, well,_ well _,” says Carcer happily, clapping his hands together. “Now here’s a nice how-d’yer-do, eh? Something for a chap to think about, and no mistake, haha.”_

That…that hadn’t been how it went. Not exactly. He hadn’t seen it from that vantage point.

Two images that were not quite the same and not quite different, layered on top of each other. Two objects occupying the same space.

Two versions, each an echo of the other, ringing out simultaneously…

“ _You want to go home now, leaving Carcer here and the real John Keel dead?” Lu-Tze asks him plaintively. “But there’ll be no home to go to, if you could do that. Because if you do, young Sam Vimes won’t get a swift course in basic policing from a decent man. He’ll learn it from people like Sergeant Knock and Corporal Quirke and Constable Colon. And that might not be the worst of it, by a long way.”_

The sound of shattering glass reeled him back from his thoughts. Vimes realised belatedly that it had been the glass pane of his office door breaking after he threw a marble paperweight of a hippopotamus through it. The faces of various watchmen were visible through the door, their expressions varying from scared to terrified, as the hubbub of the watchhouse wound down to deathly silence.

Someone cleared their throat. Angua picked up the figure of Keith from the floor, cautiously opened the door to Vimes’ office, and placed it on the desk next to Roderick. The set had been a Hogswatch present from Carrot, just in case there weren’t enough things cluttering Vimes' desk.

“Are you okay, sir?” Angua asked. Behind her, the rest of the watchhouse was slowly beginning to unfreeze from their tableau.

“I—I’m fine, Sergeant.”

“You don’t look fine, sir.”

Vimes’ shoulders slumped. “I’m just tired, Angua."

“Just saying Keith could’ve hurt someone, sir,” replied Angua, staring straight ahead, impassive. Sometimes Vimes thought he’s trained her too well. “You look like you could use a break, sir?”

Angua was overdoing it with the sirs. He must really look like shit. He stood up, grabbed his helmet from the desk and jammed it on his head. “I’m going out for some air. Who’s doing the Elm Street beat tonight?”

“Corporal Ping and Constable Filler, sir.”

“Let the officer on duty know I’m taking their shift. No argument,” Vimes said, as Angua opened her mouth to voice some protest. He swept past her and out the door, past the watchmen furiously avoiding his eye, and made his way to the street, the cobblestones reassuringly real beneath his feet, even through his too-expensive boots.

*

_Captain Carcer is every bit as cruel and brutal as Swing was, but he’s smarter about it. He knows how to read people, knows just how far to push without breaking anything, without anything backfiring on him. In excess, fear is a sufficiently strong motivator, but the trick is to take away anything that looks like an incentive to action. A balancing act between terror and apathy, the banality of evil, except Carcer isn’t bored at all. He’s enjoying himself quite a lot._

_In many instances, the threat is more effective than the action itself._

_Sam recognises these tactics in his personal dealings with the man. Carcer pushes him to what he can just about stomach, keeps him in place by making sure Sam knows where else he can be, the promise of what else he can do._

_A hand reaches out to caress his jaw, his neck, the touch insidious. It says, I can hurt you, I can hurt you, I can hurt you._

_Sam tilts his head up, bares his throat. As if he needed the damn reminder._

_Damage control. That’s the most he can do now, and it’s why he stays. Even if he runs, Carcer will find him, and despite that every inch of him wants to escape, Sam can’t leave his city in the hands of a monster._

_The hand wraps itself around his neck like a collar. Who would avenge all your dead friends, if you leave?_

_So Sam bides his time, and tries to hang on to every bit of wisdom that Keel taught him, despite that he can feel parts of himself grow brittle and hard and cold, as though he’s gradually turning to stone._

_Keep it tamed until you need it. Every impulse he stamped down, every frustrated urge, every abuse and humiliation is something new to feed the beast. It feeds on his anger and fear and hate, his resentment, his injured pride, hungry no matter how much it gorges itself, and Sam wishes it worried him more, how he can feel it grow inside him. He has a vague suspicion that it’s the kind of creature you shouldn’t be feeding after dark._

*

“ _It was his first offence.”_

“ _A thief is a thief, Vimes. He stole valuable goods from, haha, an esteemed member of the merchants' guild.”_

_Sam pauses, thinks about the boy bleeding out in the gutter. “So they pay well?”_

“ _Through the nose.”_

“ _You’re a piece of shit, Carcer,” he says, already regretting the words even as he spoke them._

_Carcer backhands him across the face, and Sam staggers a step back. “That’s captain to you, Vimes,” he hissed._

_There’s a cut on his cheek and a bruise blooming violet beneath his left eye, where Carcer struck him. Sam closes his eyes and focuses on the anger that flares inside him, focuses on the pain, like a bright line of red in the dark. Then he opens his eyes, wipes the blood from the corner of his mouth, and stands to perfect attention, his hands clasped tightly behind his back._

“ _Yes, captain,” Sam says, in a sharp, clipped voice._

_Carcer’s mouth twitches, a small tug at the corner of his lips. He puts a hand up to Sam’s face, cupping his cheek in some mockery of affection, and his thumb presses down on the bruise, digging his nail into where the skin split open. Sam winces, but resists stepping back and holds his gaze, keeps staring at Carcer as though he can burn him alive with the force of his stare._

_He does not bother to hide the anger, the pure, visceral rage, because he knows by now what Carcer wants to see. Above all, he wants a reaction. True to form, Carcer smiles, a mouthful of bright white teeth. He moves the hand down Sam’s face, until his thumb is pressing on Sam’s mouth._

_Carcer’s smile grows wider, as Sam obediently parts his lips and lets a thumb press down on the flat of his tongue._

“ _Proper discipline, Vimesy. Let’s demonstrate some due respect for rank, eh?”_

_He hates it most, when Carcer felt like talking. It’s worse than when Carcer just fucks his mouth, Sam gagging on his cock with angry tears in his eyes, or when he fucks him on the desk, Sam’s hands splayed flat on the tabletop as Carcer uses him, uses him again and again ‘til he’s sore and aching and can’t hold back the noises from his throat. Sometimes he wants to talk, holds him close, runs his hands over his skin, his touch almost affectionate, or whatever twisted mockery of affection Carcer can manage. Carcer whispers in his ear things he’s not supposed to know, talks as if he knows all of his deepest secrets, all that makes him tick. Sam, in his darkest moments, believes that he does._

_It’s worse, when Carcer doesn’t use force, and reminds Sam he doesn't need to use it at all._

_Carcer traces his mouth with his spit-slick thumb, before the hand rounds the back of his head and grabs a fistful of his hair. “On your knees, Vimes,” he says, and Sam goes, the motion practiced. Conditioning is difficult thing to fight, even if you recognise it as it happens._

_He hates Carcer, but sometimes he hates himself even more._

*

Vimes reeled back, his head pounding, and ducked into an alley. His stomach turned, as though it wanted to throw up everything he’d ever eaten in his entire life. Vimes threw up everything he’d eaten that entire day as a form of compromise.

Corner of Clay Lane and the Pitts…he was almost there. Vimes wiped the bile from his mouth and pushed himself off the wall with a grunt.

He went down another alley, half-running, past the pawnbroker and the temple, until he reached the familiar storefront of the shonky shop, now closed for the day. He banged his fist on the door furiously.

“Sweeper!” Vimes yelled. “Lu-Tze! Get out here and I will break this door down—”

“Don’t you mean ‘or’, your Grace?”

Vimes just about managed not to jump a foot in the air as the voice of Lu-Tze came from behind him, the bald man and his broom seemingly materialising out of thin air.

“How can I help you, Mister Vimes?”

“What the hell is going on?” he demanded.

Lu-Tze scratched the back of his neck, looking faintly apologetic. “We’re not all that sure, your Grace.”

“Then _guess_.”

“You’re…experiencing things that didn’t happen, almost as if they did?” Lu-Tze asked.

Vimes nodded.

“History doesn’t really like being jostled around.”

Vimes didn’t answer.

“We really didn’t see this coming.”

Vimes continued to not say anything.

“We think it’s some sort of...delayed temporal backlash?”

Vimes exploded, like a madly ringing egg-timer rigged to a stick of dynamite. “You didn’t warn me about this!”

Lu-Tze raised a finger. “Ah, but it’s not first time you’ve encountered something like it.”

Vimes opened his mouth to yell some more, before pausing. He remembered an imp in a box, ringing madly as it announced his death, though not before announcing the death of everyone else around him, _bingely-bingely-beep_ …

“The dis-organiser? During the war with Klatch?” he asked, bewildered, and Lu-Tze nodded.

“But that was just some, some technical malfunction,” Vimes said frantically. “That didn’t really...happen...” Vimes trailed off, suddenly unsure.   

“The imp was remembering a different reality, one where Sam Vimes did not go off to Klatch to stop a war and died instead defending Ankh-Morpork from invasion.”

“And that has to do with this how?”

“Well, this time you’re the imp.”

Vimes stared blankly at the monk. “So these things I’m seeing are memories? _My_ memories?”

“Yes. Well, almost.” Lu-Tze frowned. “Not quite. No. They _are_ your memories somewhere, in some time. But sometimes, quantum happens, and those memories get…misplaced.”

 _Misplaced._ Vimes let out a hoarse laugh that to his own ears sounded worryingly hysterical. It was either that or demand to arrest the fabric of time and space for doing things _so_ _godsdamned_ _wrong_.

“See, the reality we know now is the reality you created,” Lu-Tze continued. “The reality where you, as John Keel, led the revolution thirty years ago. _You’re_ the Keel everyone remembers. And yet, you were never mentored by yourself. You learned from the real John Keel. So Time is asking, trying to reconcile things—what happened to the young Sam Vimes you mentored? And it can’t find an answer. It’s poking and prodding around, it’s made a blind grab for something that's almost the answer and now that something is bleeding into our reality through the only conduit available to it.”

A memory that was not quite a memory, and now he’s a voyeur of his own personal trauma. Bleeding was certainly a word for it. “And…and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop?” asked Vimes, despairing.

“Unfortunately, your Grace," Lu-Tze answered. "At the risk of making things worse by throwing in yet another metaphor, think of time like a string that’s been plucked, or a coiled spring. It’ll eventually twang back into place, but until then you can only wait for the reverberations to stop.”

The past that had been, the past as it is, and now, apparently, the past as it could have been, as it might have been if he had failed, all swimming around in his head. A past that, somewhere, simply _was,_ because if anything can happen without breaking any physical laws, it must happen. Must have happened. We _get_ it. The concept of multiverses was frustrating enough without throwing grammatical pedantry into the mix.

Somewhere, in some reality, Vimes failed, and Carcer won, and a version of himself grew up as a madman’s chewtoy. He could’ve done without the knowing, truly, but reality hadn’t cared to ask for his bloody preference.

Time snapped back, a spring wound too tightly, wound and wound and now here comes the recoil, here comes the hurt, because it had to be felt somewhere, by someone. If a tree falls in a forest and no one was around… but someone _was_ around, because Vimes always had a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a useful talent for a copper, but not this time.

“The only thing I can assure you of is that it will pass, Mister Vimes,” said Lu-Tze, a note of pity in his voice. “You will just have to endure it until it does.”

*

_Serving under Carcer, Sam learns how to be cunning. Sam learns how to be smart the hard way. Sam learns how to fight, how to draw his sword quick and how to keep it sharp, how even the most hardened people still hesitate to deal a fatal blow, if only for a moment. Sam learns how to destroy his own hesitations._

_If nothing else, serving under Carcer is an educational experience._

_Carcer dispenses the law according to his whims, takes bribes as he fancies them and takes pleasure in killing whom he pleased, a mercurial sort of justice that was not any sort of justice at all. It’s all a game to him, to be played to his own ends._

_Damage control. Sam hunts down the thieves and murderers that Carcer allows to run loose, makes enemies of dangerous men, but the Palace Guard has the ear of the Patrician. It is distasteful, to be protected by Carcer’s influence, but Sam will make use of whatever he can to uphold the law in his stead._

_They complain about him, of course—a watchman doing his job? It cannot be tolerated. Snapcase tells Carcer off now and then about his overzealous subordinate, but Carcer lets him be, smiles knowingly at Sam as he rises through the ranks, as though audience to a private joke._

_There’s hot breath on the nape of his neck, teeth on the topmost knob of his spine. Calloused hands settle around his waist, and a foot spreads his legs shoulder-width apart. He’s down to the tunic he wore beneath his chainmail, the length of it falling just above his knees, the rest of his uniform discarded on the floor._

“ _There’s a good boy, Vimesy.”_

“ _Just get on with it,” Sam says through gritted teeth._

_That earns him a laugh. Open-mouthed kisses press along the curve of his shoulders, along the side of his neck. His skin crawls at the touch like an insect with too many legs._

“ _Impatient, eh?” Carcer whispers against his ear, grinds his half-hard cock against his arse for emphasis._

_Sam swallows back a dozen curses, a dozen swears, and settles with a bitten-off, “Sir.”_

_Fingers dig painfully into his side. Carcer handles him roughly, turns him about so that they face each other, pushes up against him so that Sam is on his toes, half-sitting on the table._

“ _Y’know Vimesy, old Sergeant Keel had a lot of chances to kill me,” he says conversationally. He leans in close, near enough that Sam can smell the cigarettes on his breath._

“ _Could’ve killed me plenty of times if he hadn’t been so bloody-minded about it,” Carcer continues. “So concerned about little things like justice and fairness.” His hands roam, hikes up the front of Sam’s shirt and takes him in hand, stroking his cock to hardness. Sam gasps, even as he tries to stifle the involuntary noise. These days his body reacts without consulting him, which is probably for the better of both parties. If he had a choice, he’d choose not to think about any of it._

“ _So if you’re angry at anyone, really, it should be him, you think?” Carcer says, smiling against Sam’s mouth. He kisses him then, deep and languid. Sam wants to bite off his tongue and watch him bleed to death._

_Instead, Sam stays in place, his nails digging furrows into the wood grain of the table._

_Just another bribe, a give and take. Carcer allows him some degree of freedom and the currency is Sam’s absolute obedience, when Carcer demands it._

_Or maybe it’s the other way around. The worst criminal of them all walks free, and Sam suffers him because he cannot kill him. Not yet, at least._

_Keel believed that the law exists to protect the people. Carcer believes that the law is lawlessness, that the law does not exist at all. Sam learns that both Keel and Carcer are wrong—the law exists to punish the wicked. The law is to punish the wicked._

_They whisper about him. Carcer is a snake, full of venom, but that Sam Vimes, he’s a rabid dog who will bite anyone._

_(He is learning all the wrong things.)_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, so I lied. there's one more chapter after this.

Vimes took to patrolling the more wayward streets of the city as a means of distraction, glaring at the shadows and daring them to commit some sort of crime. Everywhere he went, he radiated more than his usual anger, which was only part and parcel with the man, after all—no, he emanated _wrath_ , the sort that gods smote down on helpless mortals unlucky enough to piss them off.

It wasn’t the most innovative coping mechanism, but he’d be fine with the lack of originality if it was at least effective, except that it wasn’t. The criminal underbelly of Ankh-Morpork, despite being seedier than an everything dwarf battle bagel, had a well-honed sense of self-preservation, and knew when to duck its head down and wait for the storm to pass. Even licensed thieves and assassins found themselves busy with something aside from their everyday professions.

Everywhere Vimes patrolled was frustratingly law-abiding, leaving him with more time and space to be alone with his thoughts—two things which he absolutely did not need and were, in fact, the very source of his current predicament.

Realising its narrative cue, the rain began to pour down the city in buckets, just in time to match Vimes’ mood. It was the kind of rain that drenched you in mere moments, cold that leeched warmth away as it seeped into your clothes, your skin, into your very bones.

“Sod it all,” he muttered under his breath, as he threw under away his damp cigar and ducked for the cover of some doorway. The lights of the house were out, but it was well past midnight at that point, so Vimes couldn’t tell if it was abandoned or if its inhabitants were simply asleep, like normal people with normal human hours.

Vimes shook another cigar out of his case and struck a match on the brick wall. He took a long drag and leaned back against the wooden door, watching the cloud of smoke drift away and disintegrate beneath the downpour of rain.

Sometimes he hated how much he lived inside his own head. Vimes recognised strategy, methodical and meticulous, in the way Carcer shaped his younger counterpart like clay. Which strings to pull, which strings to cut, which buttons to push with just the right amount of pressure to prod the beast awake and bait it out of its hiding place. _The law is the punishment of the wicked_. He wondered just how well Carcer had understood him.

Everything is clearer in hindsight, but Vimes thought this was just taking it too damn far.

A part of Vimes—the paranoid, suspicious bastard part of him—suspected that somehow, Carcer knew that Vimes would see his work. It was as though he had set out to prove a point, that all it would take— _had_ taken—for the incorruptible Sam Vimes to break was a nudge in the wrong direction, at the appropriate fork in the road. Didn’t matter that his primary target audience was dead, as far as he knew. He was performing for the universe at large.

Where Vimes was hammered (literally and metaphorically) through the decades on the anvil of life, forged and tempered into strong, unyielding steel, his other self had been filed to the brittle-sharp point of a needle, all too liable to shatter. It was jarring, to be shown so explicitly that, under the right set of circumstances, he had become precisely the kind of monster he feared he could be. It was as though he was wearing a blindfold before, and now it’s been untied, to show him just how close he’d been standing to the edge of a bottomless cliff.

He tossed the stub of his cigar onto the cobblestones, where the rain ground it to a damp pulp. A part of Vimes—the part that was honest with himself, despite his best efforts—knew that it was just as well that the criminals kept away. That same part was afraid that in his current high-strung state, he might just end up stumbling off the edge entirely.  

The rain didn’t look as though it was about to let up anytime soon.

*

_As a member of the Palace Guard, Sam doesn’t need to patrol anywhere outside the immediate vicinity of the palace and the surrounding neighbourhoods, whose inhabitants were rich enough to warrant their protection. Sam patrols anyway, out of duty and self-preservation both. While he can’t refuse Carcer’s direct summons, the man has other distractions occasionally, and patrolling is a good excuse to keep as much out of his way as possible._

_At night, he roams the city like a stray. He misses carrying around a bell, sometimes. Twelve o’clock and all’s well…_

_This late into the evening, the streets are empty, quiet, though Sam knows better than to take it as face value. He walks along the river, where castoff from recent rains made the Ankh appear almost like a body of water. His breath shows white in the cold, damp air._

_He turns about a curve in the road, and stops in his tracks. Carcer stands in the lamplight of a dim street corner, leaning against a wall as he conversed with another man. Sam is too far to hear what they’re saying, but from the other man’s profuse, cowering gestures of apology, he can hazard a guess._

_Carcer looks up, and waves cheerily at him. He claps the other man on the shoulder and makes his way down the street to Sam, who doesn’t bother wiping the scowl away from his face._

“ _Making the rounds then, Vimesy? What a diligent lad you are.”_

_Sam walks past him as though to continue his patrol, hoping that Carcer will let him be this one time, and answers with a wooden, “Sir.”_

_Well, it is the same luck that led him to Carcer in the first place, so Sam is more resigned than surprised when Carcer trails alongside him and matches his pace._

“ _Chilly night to be out and about, Sergeant Vimes.” He brings an arm around Sam’s shoulder. “Little late, ain’t it?”_

_Sam’s expression is blank as he answers. “Apparently not too late for some blackmail and extortion, sir?”_

“ _Hard-working, but still got quite a smart mouth on you,” Carcer replies, almost fondly, brushing a calloused thumb against his cheek as Sam stamps down a flinch. He knows he’s going to pay for that comment sooner rather than later._

_Before Sam can answer, a group of shadows disentangles itself from the darkness of an alleyway, armed to the teeth with knives._

_The first thing Sam noted—aside from the knives—is that they are dressed too shabbily to be members of the guild. Perhaps they are new to the city, and haven’t had time to get acquainted with the Guard’s reputation. Perhaps they are just too desperate and hungry to care, young and half-starved and fixated on Carcer’s gleaming armor. Perhaps it’s a personal grudge. The Palace has enough enemies. Both him and Carcer most certainly have enough enemies._

_Carcer smiles, eyes and teeth gleaming out from the dark, like a cheshire cat._

“ _The rats have come out to play, haven’t they, Vimesy? Let’s make it a game then.” Carcer leans in close to whisper in his ear, “Let’s see who can kill more rats.”_

_Sam’s mouth is a grim line as he draws his sword. Already, Carcer is moving towards the would-be thieves, arms spread wide and welcoming. “How can the Palace Watch help you gentlemen tonight?”_

“ _Don’t got time for jokers,” said one of the men gruffly, presumably the ringleader. “Tell that boy to drop his sword. We don’t got business with him.”_

“ _Vimesy, wanna put down your sword?”_

_Sam is still as he holds the sword in front of him._

_Carcer sighs. “If you insist,” he says, before he pulls a knife from his belt and throws it in the eye of the man who spoke._

_Everyone freezes at the sight of gushing red, everyone except for Carcer and Sam. Carcer already has a second knife in his hands as he rushes forward, carving a deep gash across the face of the nearest thief. Three of them run at Sam, and he meets the first one to reach him with a slash of his sword._

_Sam steps back and gores through the next attacker, burying the sword halfway through his chest. Seeing his chance, the third darts forward with a knife, before Sam can pull out his sword, but Sam steps to the side and elbows the man in the face. The man falls to his knees, blood gushing painfully from his broken nose, and brings up his arms as Sam pulls the sword free._

_He hardly remembers how to hesitate, anymore._

_More men come up to attack him, their faces twisted with rage. He kicks the first in the kneecap with a steel-toed boot, crushes another man’s windpipe with a jab of his fist. They fall one after the other as Sam cuts them down, four, five, six. The beast opens its maws, rusted chains rattling as it laps hungrily at the bloodshed._

_Over the sound of his owned laboured breathing, there is a noise from behind him. He turns to face the rest of the assailants, but there is only Carcer, sitting on his own pile of bodies as he claps his hands in congratulations._

“ _Exemplary work, Mister Vimes!”_

_Carcer gets to his feet, uninjured, and puts a cigarette to his mouth. He walks towards Sam. “That’ll teach these boys not to mess with the Watch.”_

_Blood trickled down the edge of his sword and onto the cobbles, drip, drip._

“ _They weren’t thieves,” says Sam. “Thieves wouldn’t go after armed watchmen. They were after you.”_

“ _Thieves, murderers—we’ve caught them, haha, red-handed you could say, assaulting officers of the peace.”_

_Sam’s grip on the sword tightens as he looks at the carnage of bodies on the ground. Most of them look young, maybe about the same age as himself, or even younger._

“ _What did they want from you?”_

_Carcer blows out a cloud of smoke, waves a hand to dissipate it. “Oh, who knows? You can’t honestly expect me to remember.”_

_A personal grudge… Maybe they couldn’t afford to pay, maybe they’d been on the end of one of Carcer’s shakedowns one time too many, but whatever it was, Sam had gone and done Carcer’s dirty work for him, like a dog trained to bark on command…_

“ _I should’ve let them kill you,” Sam says breathlessly._

“ _That hurts, Vimesy,” Carcer replies, frowning. “This after I asked you all nice like to put down your sword, cause I_ did _ask you, but you were just so eager to get on with the killing.”_

“ _I didn’t want to kill them!” he yells, his voice trembling. “I’m not like you!”_

_Carcer smiles. He looks Sam up and down, covered all over in blood. “Maybe, maybe not, but the end result is what matters, I’d say,” and crushes the stub of his cigarette on the front of Sam’s breastplate._

_Keep it tamed keep it tamed keep it tamed—_

“ _I wonder what ol’ Sergeant Keel would think, if he could see you now,” Carcer adds offhandedly as he turns to walk ahead of him, hands in his pockets._

_The beast whines, pulling at its chains, still so very hungry…_

_Sam takes a step forward, then another, each movement heavy, each moment suddenly slowed down to half its usual running time. The hand holding his sword goes up._

_Sam stabs Carcer through the back, the blade sliding just beneath the armor to pierce him through to his front. He pulls back, as Carcer clutches at the wound on his stomach. Carcer falls forward to his hands and knees, coughing up blood on the cobblestones._

“ _Fuck!” He glares up at Sam, teeth gritted. “You fucking brat, you fucking traitorous brat—”_

_Carcer leaps up at Sam suddenly, catching him by surprise, and knocks the sword out of his hand. He pushes him up against a wall, knocking his head back against the stone, and grabs him by his throat. Vision darkening, lungs screaming for air, Sam’s hands scrabble uselessly at the fingers around his neck. The world blurs, tunnels down to the sight of Carcer’s face._

_With a surge of rage, he rams his knee to the wound on Carcer’s stomach._

_Carcer staggers back, trips on a cobblestone. He falls to the ground again. Sam kicks at his side, aiming for the wound, forcing him on his back. The sword is nowhere to be found. He climbs on top of Carcer, one knee driving into his stomach, and wraps his hands around Carcer’s neck._

_Sam’s hands are slick with blood. Carcer’s pulse thuds beneath his fingers as he squeezed and squeezed, legs kicking out beneath him, red bubbling from his mouth. Carcer’s grip on his wrists slacken. This man will not escape the rope, the hanging, the noose tightening—the law is the punishment of the wicked—_

_Carcer bares his teeth, smiling up at Sam through a mouthful of blood. He is gasping weakly, small, shallow panting breaths, and it takes Sam a moment to realise he is laughing._

_Sam doesn’t know how long Carcer takes to die, doesn’t know how long he kneels there choking a man who’s already dead. At some point the laughter had stopped, the body had gone still, but Sam doesn’t let go until the ringing in his ears dissipated, like the ghost of a whistle._

_Eventually, he stands, hands hanging limply at his sides. After a few moments of searching, he finds his sword on the ground some feet away from them and puts it back in his sheath, uncaring of the blood still drying on it._

_Before he leaves, he gets down on one knee beside the corpse, rifles Carcer’s pockets until he finds it. Sam takes out the pack of smokes and matchbook, puts a battered cigarette to his lips and lights it. He coughs, waves the smoke away, and gets to his feet. Soon the rats will come, and then the scavengers._

_On one of the rooftops above, a green-grey shadow stirs, watching interestedly as Sam walks down the street, heading back in the direction of the palace._

*

_Snapcase is deposed with little fanfare, a quick, perfunctory hanging, and Havelock Vetinari becomes Patrician at the tender age of twenty-seven, the youngest tyrant that Ankh-Morpork has ever seen._

_The ruling classes of the city do not consider this as much of a drawback, especially considering how unfortunately his predecessor had…deviated from his responsibilities. It was general consensus that, towards the end of his tenure, Snapcase did not have the city’s best interests at heart, which coincidentally just happen to align perfectly with their best interests. So perhaps a young Patrician is the solution: eager, wide-eyed, malleable. Against these expectations, it hardly matters that Vetinari did not fit any of the above. It’s hard to notice you’re being manipulated when you think you’re the one doing the manipulating._

_Of course, not everyone is stupid enough to buy his youth as permission to underestimate him. Youth is useless as a measure of one’s capacity for terror._

_Sam Vimes, age twenty-six and Captain of the Palace Guard, stands before his desk at perfect attention. He meets Vetinari’s scrutiny with complete equanimity, his expression perfectly unreadable._

“ _And how are you finding your new command, Captain Vimes?”_

“ _We’re still just trying to find sure footing, sir. I think my men and I will adapt just fine, in this time of transition.”_

_Vetinari leans back in his chair, tilts his head thoughtfully, chin resting on one hand. “Quite a lot of adapting might be in order, captain. You’ll find I don’t plan on running things the way the late Lord Snapcase did.”_

_Sam smiles coldly. “Glad to hear it, sir,” he says, with an unmistakable note of warning. “I don’t plan on running things like the late Captain Carcer did, either.”_

“ _Really? Maybe something more in line with how an old sergeant used to run things, perhaps?”_

_Abrupt silence follows his words, the silence of a hand reaching out to grab a ringing bell and forcing it still._

“ _Maybe so,” Sam finally answers, almost pleasantly. “Though I’d advise your Lordship against poking at old wounds. Never know what might poke back.”_

_Captain Carcer had always been too dangerous, too capricious, for Vetinari to have considered him as anything other than an obstacle to be dealt it, when the time came. But the time came and passed, and Sam Vimes…_

_He is young, young and bristling with rage just barely contained, burning bright red like a flame hungry for more firewood. Destructive if uncontrolled, but fire can be tamed, has a myriad number of applicable uses and, if proven to be too unpredictable, can be doused if necessary. An interesting variable, no doubt, but dealing with Sam Vimes is a simple enough matter if you learn how to aim him properly. It would be a shame, Vetinari thinks, to let all that go to waste._

_Vetinari smiles. “Noted, Captain,” he replies, matching Sam in tone to issue a warning of his own._

_The Patrician dismisses the Captain of the Palace Guard with little ceremony, and shuffles around a number of files on his desk. Plans are useless if they can’t be changed. He is nothing if not adaptable as well._

*

“You seem distracted, your Grace.”

“Sir.”

Vetinari regarded him with his usual scrutiny, sitting behind his desk. “I have just asked you your opinion on the situation in Borogravia. Or is the wall just two inches slightly above my left shoulder all that engrossing?”

Vimes flinched, and tried to stand even straighter, though the damage was already done. He _had_ been staring over Vetinari’s shoulder, face carefully blank, but he had not realised he’d missed such a blatant cue. He cleared his throat, and said, “Sorry, sir. I haven’t, uh, slept well recently.”

“Overworked, perhaps? Lady Sybil informs me that you’ve hardly been home at all, these recent weeks.”

That earned another flinch. “I don’t know what she’s been telling you, but whatever it is—”

“Your wife is worried about you, Vimes," said Vetinari sharply, cutting him off.

Vimes tensed, and Vetinari waved a hand dismissively. “She’s not the only one, I must say. Sergeant Angua had come in to see me yesterday to express similar concerns.”

Angua? Why would she come to Vetinari? Vimes frowned, his brows furrowing, but only said, “Sir?”

“Possibly she is under the somewhat doubtful impression that you listen to me occasionally,” Vetinari replied with a small smile. “Appealing to a higher authority, one might say. I suppose it is not entirely amiss in this situation. This technically falls within a professional context, and I _am_ your boss, so if I were to give you an order that you can’t creatively interpret…”

Alarm bells started ringing in Vimes’ head, though fat lot of good they did going off now. All they did was add to his nearly perpetual headache. “Hold on, Vetinari—”

“You took only two days off after your son was born. Perhaps some mandatory leave—”

“No!” Vimes said in a voice of mild panic, where Vetinari should have been expecting indignant denial. He backpedalled hastily, even as the Patrician raised an eyebrow. “I mean, I don’t need the time off, sir.”

“Vimes,” Vetinari began, “you are listless and visibly distressed. Your clothes are disheveled, more than your usual dishabille. The circles under your eyes inform me and all those around you that you have not had a good night’s sleep in days. Your men are worried for you, when they are not busy being terrified by your mercurial moods. _Sybil_ is worried for you. If I am not given a reason otherwise, Commander, then I have no choice but to carry through with my best judgment.”

Vetinari paused, and then added, with a softness in his voice that Vimes could almost call kind, “You look tired, Sam.”

Vimes’ jaw dropped. _That_ broke the alarm bells entirely and started sounding off loud, blaring klaxons, accompanied with blinking red warning lights. He wished he could install something less intrusive inside his head, like clacks towers. His head could do with a bit of modernisation anyway.

He tried to think up some sarcastic remark to counter what seemed like Vetinari’s genuinely caring about his wellbeing, but it was an ingenious strategy on Vetinari's part and not one Vimes had encountered before, which left him at a loss. However, his mouth failed to get the memo and answered for him anyway, possibly reasoning that it since it _was_ open already then it might as well contribute something.

“B—bad dreams, sir.”

“Not dreams in the usual sense, I suspect.”

“Sir?”

“Is magic involved?” Vetinari asked, as Vimes tried not to wince.

“Where are you going with this?”

“You are not, after all, a stranger to nightmares. I’m merely wondering what is different about these ones.”

“Yeah, well…they’re worse.”  

“How enlightening,” said Vetinari archly. “Please answer the question, your Grace.”

”I’m not sure!” If there was ever a time that Sam Vimes would voluntarily use the word _harangued_ , that time might be now. “Something about the bloody fabric of time and space being mad at me!”

Vetinari raised an eyebrow, again. It was really rather unfair how much the bastard could say with just the one eyebrow, enough to make the other party feel like a heel for not holding up their end of the conversation.

Well, he’d already admitted it. Might as well just plow on. Vimes took a small breath, and said, “I’m…seeing things, about how wrong everything could’ve gone, if I hadn’t been able to do the job I needed to do. But it’s _temporary_ ,” he added. “I just have to wait it out.”

"Ah."

For a moment, Vetinari simply looked at him, in that unnaturally still way that made Vimes want to fidget in place just to compensate for the overall lack of motion. The moment broke when Vetinari put a hand up to his mouth, his expression suspiciously pensive. “How wrong everything could’ve gone in the general sense, or in a more personal capacity?”

Vimes looked down at his boots, his clenched jaw all the answer that the Patrician required.

“How d’you guess?”

“Why, your Grace,” said Vetinari in a voice of mild surprise. “That you would even ask how I should know how evil men think. I suppose I should be flattered.”

“Evil men can do all kinds of damage,” said Vimes, with sudden quiet anger, though he wasn’t entirely certain who or even what was its intended recipient, aside from the obvious suspect. Granted, outrage was his typical default state, but this was a discomfited sort of anger, the kind that didn’t sit well until it found some sort of outlet.

He had given only the barest explanation, and yet Vetinari was able to wring nearly the whole story out of it…

Vimes thought fondly of the small dent in the drywall right outside the Patrician’s office.

“The university had a conference only recently,” said Vetinari, somehow managing to be graceful even with his non-sequiturs. “An academic symposium on the theory of alternate realities. Of course, most of the technical details went over my head, but there are some articles that might be of particular interest to you.”

“That doesn’t even deserve me saying that doesn’t deserve a response,” said Vimes. Vetinari sighed.

“A garden of forking paths, your Grace. Carcer was a hedonist, myopic in his sadism. Intelligent, but ultimately concerned with his own immediate gratification,” Vetinari said.

Then, he turned a piercing stare directly at Vimes, with those eyes the same colour as ice floes and with nearly as much warmth. “Possibilities and scenarios and what-ifs. You may be preoccupied with them now, Vimes, but they are nearly the whole of that which occupies me.”

Vimes blinked, and resisted the urge to shudder. He was right, of course. For all the abundance of contempt that their familiarity must have bred, raised, and sent off to boarding school throughout all the long years of their acquaintance, it would never do to forget for even a second how much of a terrifying bastard his Lord Patrician was.

( _But even he used to be so young…_ )

Gods, his head was killing him. Vimes put a hand up to his temple, his shoulders slumping. “Well, that just saves me the trouble of explaining, then.”

“Ah, but I am not that merciful a tyrant, your Grace,” said Vetinari, leaning forward over his desk. “You have yet to convince me why I shouldn’t order your necessary leave to allow you some time to recuperate.”

The panic returned, as though to berate Vimes for having let the conversation meander so thoroughly. With everything he knew, Vetinari couldn’t _still_ be considering—

“I can’t—I can’t be home right now, sir,” Vimes said, with not a little desperation in his voice, nearly pleading. _Not in the same house as Sybil, as young Sam…_

“But the manner in which you are dealing with this is unsustainable.”

“I’m not exactly drowning in options on how to deal with this!” he yelled, clenching his fists. What was Vetinari getting at, except telling him to cope _better_? “Does _The Laws and Ordinances of the Cities of Ankh and Morpork_ have a section on what to do in case some crapsack reality decided to make itself at home in your head that I didn’t know about?!”

“You can speak to someone about it. A confidante, you might say.”

“...What?”

“I understand that this is not a subject you’d wish to share with Lady Sybil, but I’ve been informed that I am quite a good listener.”

"...You're kidding."

"Not at all, your Grace."

Vimes continued to look at Vetinari as though he'd suggested Vimes should wear a suit made out of meat and jump into a den of starved bears. "Don't take this personally, sir, but there is absolutely nothing about that idea that sounds remotely appealing in the slightest."

"You're under a lot of strain."

“You want me to talk about my problems…with you…?”

“At your own pace, your Grace.”

“ _Why?_ ”

“You must already suspect that this is not something you can handle with only your, ah, admittedly prodigious capacity for denial.”

Vimes let out a bark of laughter, half-disbelief, half-hysteria. "If I have to come to your Lordship for help, I think it'd just be better to call it quits at that and chuck myself in the loony bin."

Lord Vetinari shrugged. “I wouldn’t recommend such drastic measures just yet. For now, I would suggest you take some time to consider the option,” he then said, in a voice that made it clear it wasn’t a suggestion at all. “For now, go rest, Commander. Go home, or at least to the cot in your office at Pseudopolis Yard. You might as well try to get some sleep, if the nightmares can follow you anywhere.”


End file.
